1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for processing image data, and more particularly to an image compressing system and method where a digital image is segmented into a plurality of object regions and where the object regions are represented by a layered image representation.
2. Related Art
With the ever increasing popularity of multimedia, there is an increasing demand for a high accurate image processing technique having the same quality as printing or photography. The image data is massive in data quantity compared with sound data, etc., and as the image becomes more accurate, the data quantity is exponentially increased. Therefore, it is indispensable in the image processing arts to encode image data for compressing the image data.
For example, JPEG as an international standard is known for encoding a color still image. In this standard there is proposed an encoding method such as a method (lossy) where there is information loss but compressibility is good and a method (lossless) where an original image can be completely restored to the original state. The "lossy" method and the "lossless" method entirely differ in encoding. Therefore, when a lossy compressed image is desired to be converted to a lossless image of higher quality, users have to encode image data of entirely different format again with a different algorithm in spite of the same original image.
As described above, between the lossy method and the lossless method, the image data has so far been compressed with different formats. Therefore, user's burden is heavy because the user must encode image data of entirely different format with a different algorithm.